About a decade ago I wrote a review for a US film site on Cop, a 1988 neo noir directed by James B. Harris, based on Blood on the Moon, the first of three books featuring the character of Floyd Hopkins, written by James Ellroy in the mid eighties. In it I argued that not only was Cop the best film adaptation of Ellroy novel, it most faithfully channelled the spirit of Ellroy’s work.
The post caused a predictable flurry of criticism from those who rated 1997’s LA Confidential the best adaptation. Some even felt the need to refer back to what Ellroy himself had said about the merits of movies made of his books, which seems pretty stupid to me because the author is nearly always out for a headline and his opinions change all the time.
Anyway, I’ve noticed a bit of a spike lately of mentions of Cop on my socials, which reminded me of why I think it’s such a good film.
Cop opens with the discovery of a woman’s mutilated body in an LA apartment building. First on the scene is Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins (James Woods), and the only clues are a blood-smeared book of radical feminist poetry called Rage in the Womb and a stack of newspapers with the same advertisement for a swinger party circled in red. The newspaper adverts lead him to Joanie Pratt, “former actress, model, singer, dancer and what usually follows”, who admits she was helping the murdered woman, Julie Niemeyer, research the swinger scene.
When a letter written in human blood turns up in Niemeyer’s PO Box, Hopkins pulls the files on all unsolved LA homicides going back several years. It’s not long before he thinks he’s dealing with a serial killer, much to the concern of his born again Christian commander, who is afraid the public will panic at the possibility.
Undeterred, Hopkins fronts the Sheriff’s deputy who discovered two of the bodies Hopkins suspects were victims of the serial killer, Delbert ‘Whitey’ Haines (Charles Haid). Hopkins creeps Haines’ pad and finds marijuana, S&M gear, guns, and a wire that someone has been using to secretly tape Haines and his attempts to extort gay hustlers, including one called Birdman, for drugs and money. Next he checks out women’s bookstores for leads on the bloodstained tome of feminist poetry found at scene of the Niemeyer killing. Despite their obvious political differences, he and the owner of one of these stores, Kathleen McCarthy (Lesley Ann Warren) a tense, chain-smoking anti-police feminist strike up a rapport.
Hopkins takes Kathleen, instead of his wife, to a party full of LAPD brass and talking to her later that night discovers that she is still recovering from a rape that occurred in the last year of her high school. She also tells him since that time fifteen years ago, someone has been anonymously sending her flowers. When Hopkins notices photos of Haines and another student nicknamed Birdman in McCarthy’s senior Yearbook, his suspicions are further raised. He breaks into McCarthy’s house and finds that the flowers, which she has kept pressed in glass, correspond to the dates on the women he suspects were victims of the serial killer were murdered. From here the body and sleaze count ratchets up considerably.
The studio behind Cop were reportedly concerned that it would be seen as a slasher movie when what they wanted was something more like Dirty Harry. What they ended up with was a film that combines multiple crime film tropes, the rogue cop, the police procedural, the vigilante and, of course, the serial killer, into an uncut little gem of a neo noir.
Cop is like a primer on how to do an eighties crime film. The washed out look, the sound track of heavy synthesiser interspersed with wailing sax, lots of badly dressed cops in houndstooth jackets, etc.
And, no, I have not changed my mind about it being the best Ellroy adaptation. The film fully evokes the source novel and so many of the themes in Ellroy’s crime fiction more generally. Its wider sexual politics are open to multiple interpretations - good and bad. The plot is complex but has a narrative drive that cuts corners in terms of believability but ends up largely working. And the script catches the frenetic pace of Ellroy’s writing and dialogue. Hands down the best line is when Hopkins kills a suspect and gets his partner, Dutch, (Charles Durning) to deal with the consequences while he hits on the dead guy’s girlfriend. “You blow away a broad’s date, the least you can do is drive her home,” Hopkins says.
Woods is central to how good the film is. The original bad lieutenant, he gives a pitch perfect portrayal of Hopkins as a sleazy, womanising, hard driving homicide dick trying to track down a maniac no one else thinks exists, and prepared to destroy everything in his path to do so.
I know Woods is very much out of fashion due to his hard right, pro-Trump politics. I don’t know whether he was always so positioned on the political spectrum. Nonetheless, he was a major presence in some great American films, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. These include: The Onion Field (1979), in which he played a disturbed ex-con who panics one night when he and his partner are pulled over by cops and murders one of them; his turn as a cult buster in Split Image (1982); the sleazy soft porn cable TV producer Max Renn in Videodrome (1983); the woefully underrated Best Seller (1987), in which he plays an unbalanced hit man who approaches a best selling author and cop (Brian Dennehy) to write the story of his work as a hired killer for a corrupt politician; and, of course, who can forget the the reptilian hustler Lester Diamond, leaching off Ginger (sharon Stone), Robert De Niro’s promiscuous, alcoholic wife, in Casino (1995). And I have not even mentioned Once Upon a Time In America (1984), Diggstown (1982) and Another Day in Paradise (1998).
Cop was directed by James B Harris, who also wrote the screenplay. Harris was a big name Hollywood producer, but he only directed a handful of films. These included the excellent Cold War nuclear thriller The Bedford Incident (1965), the not so good Boiling Point (1993), and another film with Woods, which has pretty much disappeared from view, but is excellent, Fast-Walking (based on a novel called The Rap by Ernest Brawley), released in 1982.
Woods plays Frank ‘Fast Walking’ Minivar, a permanently stoned prison guard, who pimps girls to the local Chicano farm workers as a sideline. The prison he works in is on edge after the murder of a black inmate, a situation worsened by the imminent arrival of William Galliot, a radical black nationalist. The Klan want Galliot dead and there are rumours the prison authorities have put a contract out on him.
Minivar is pressured by Wasco, his Neo Nazi biker cousin, also an prison inmate, to kill Galliot for $25,000. He is also approached by a group of black nationalists to bust Galliot out for $50,000. Minivar has many faults but racism is not among them. An equal opportunist hustler, he decides the best way out of minimum wage hell is to try and play both sides against each other.
Apart from a very young Woods, there is so much that is interesting in this film. Fast-Walking takes its time establishing the plot and character and is not perturbed examining side plots that at first don’t seem to have any connection to the central theme. Black power, racism, the fading influence of the counterculture, and drug use and and violence in prison, are just some of the issues touched on. There’s a Lalo Schifrin soundtrack and a tremendous supporting cast, including J Emmet Walsh as Minivar’s prison boss and the much underrated Kay Lenz as a mysterious femme fatale connected to his biker cousin.
Revolution in 35mm Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990
My book with critic Samm Deighan, Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990, will soon be out in the world.
In addition to writing by Samm and myself, it includes terrific essays from another twelve writers and critics, on an incredibly broad and diverse body of cinema, spanning from the Algerian war of independence and the early wave of post-colonial struggles that reshaped the Global South, through to the collapse of Soviet Communism in the very early 1990s.
The book focuses on films related to the rise of protest movements by students, workers, and leftist groups, as well as broader countercultural movements, Black Power, the rise of feminism, and so on. It also includes films that explore the splinter groups that engaged in violent, urban guerrilla struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as the promise of widespread radical social transformation failed to materialize: the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Japan, and Italy’s Red Brigades.
Many of these movements were deeply connected with and expressed their values through art, literature, popular culture, and, of course, cinema. The contributors include academics and well know film critics, and they all deliver a diverse examination of how filmmakers around the world reacted to the political violence and resistance movements of the period and how this was expressed on screen. This includes looking at the financing, distribution, and screening of these films, audience and critical reaction, the attempted censorship or suppression of much of this work, and how directors and producers eluded these restrictions.
And it is also beautifully illustrated in full colour.
The book is due to hit actual real shelves in the US in late August/early September. Meanwhile, should you be so inclined you can pre-order it from the publisher PM Press via this link.
Awesome film. Woods is fantastic in Salvador, too.
LA CONFIDENTIAL tends to be more highly regarded as the classier Ellroy adaptation but in doing so fails to capture the sleazier aspects of his prose that COP nails so beautifully. It isn't afraid to be politically incorrect all over the place, which makes James Woods casting spot on as he, likewise isn't interested in playing nice but being true to the material.
I love all the minutia to his day-to-day cop work, like how he conducts himself in the office, and how he handles a crime scene. Great attention to detail.
There are also fantastic little bits of business, like the hilarious scene where Woods' character tells his little girl a "bedtime" story.
BEST SELLER is another gem of a film and part of a great run for Woods in the '80s. He has a fantastic, tension-filled relationship with Brian Dennehy and the frisson between their two characters is a huge appeal of that film.